Revisiting my Dark Side

Lots of people have been asking about what The Dark Side is, and the more they ask and the more I invent increasingly long answers for them, the more excited I get by the thought of carrying on its creation. A mutual colleague expressed her interest at recreating the architecture of a song for an audience - the way you lean into phrases, sink into a chorus, take pleasure in the structure of a song before you've even listened to the lyrics. It's this pleasure, where it leads your imagination (dark corners and recesses) and its possibilities for expression on stage that drove the first scratch performance of the piece.

Nick Cave's music is dark and mysterious, and the imagination is given permission to explore that mystery through the song's architecture - its monotonous riffs, achingly visual lyrics and dark humour - and through its protagonist's macabre soul-searching. At some point we want to fit in a battery-controlled Herbie that plays a tune and its lights flash on and off and the rooftop fits into the boot, over and over. Maybe it will bite someone's ankles in a vicious and terrible way. This is perhaps the interest in doing a dark piece of theatre in an irreverent and silly manner. Laughing in the face of death. HA.